Great Drives: Mustang ride on the boulevard of dreams

Route 66 is now more of a back road than a transcontinental highway but Nicholas Rufford finds it is still the best way to experience America

??Get your kicks on Route 66,?? wrote Bobby Troup, a young American songwriter in 1946. His melody became a hit for Nat King Cole and helped immortalise a 2,448-mile length of highway stretching across eight states from Chicago to the Pacific.

Few roads get to be immortalised in song, but then few roads are as evocative as Route 66. The Corniche along the C??te d??Azur may be more glamorous, and the Great Ocean Road in Australia more spectacular, but none arouses as much sense of adventure as America??s first transcontinental highway.

John Steinbeck, in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, named it the ??mother road??, into which all westbound traffic flowed. And west was where I was heading when I arrived in a rain-soaked Hertz parking lot at O??Hare airport, Chicago.

After the transatlantic flight my body clock was adrift by six hours; it was dark when it should have